A group of defectors to South Korea from the North is asking President Bush to step up American satellite surveillance of North Korea’s political prison camps, warning Mr. Bush that Kim Jong Il may order the massacre of prisoners to destroy evidence of his crimes.

The defectors met on Monday with the American ambassador in South Korea, Thomas Hubbard, who accepted the letter to Mr. Bush.

“There are plans to massacre gulag prisoners by mass burials if a war breaks out or if tensions continue to intensify,” the letter warns. Among those who delivered it to Ambassador Hubbard were three former inmates at the Yodok prison camp in the South Hamgyong Province of North Korea and one former guard at the Hoeryong prison camp in the North Hamgyong Province of North Korea. They have first-hand knowledge of what they are warning.

The defectors’ letter is worth heeding not only because some of them saw the camps firsthand but because the authors are friends of America.”We were born and raised in North Korea, so as we grew up, we were educated and indoctrinated with baseless beliefs about the United States. We were taught to hate the United States,” the letter says. “But since we have arrived in South Korea, we have discovered that we must radically change our way of thinking.” The letter goes on to express solidarity with America’s liberation of Iraq. It concludes, “If President Bush, in the interest of freedom and human rights, made a wise judgment and firm resolution to save the lives of 20 million North Koreans, they would forever remember such kindness.”

“If Nazi concentration camps killed prisoners by poison gas, North Korean gulags systematically slaughter prisoners by starving them or killing them through grueling forced labor,” the letter says. It notes that “from 1994 to 1998, on North Korean land, about three million people have died from starvation.”

We’re wary of Nazi analogies, which are almost always inappropriate. And still — the thought of the mass burial the defectors are warning of is so unpleasant that we’d all probably rather not think about it. The names of the North Korean camps — Yodok, Hoeryong, Hwasong, Chongjin- Susong, and Kaechon — are known in the free world, yet they are not yet household words. The news of the prison camps has made it to the papers yet is rarely on page one of the mainstream press. The public debate in America has focused mainly on the military threat of North Korea’s nuclear program, not on the Communist tyranny’s treatment of its own citizens. Those Americans trying to bring the abuses to the world’s attention are a collection of underfunded activists, many of them religious.

The defectors, organized in a group called Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulags, deserve an answer to their letter to Mr. Bush. Such an answer could come in writing or in action. Here’s hoping it is one America can be proud of — not limited to the redirecting of some spy satellites, worthwhile though that would be, but to relegating the North Korean Communist regime to history’s scrap heap.